Something whips through the dark cloud above us, tossed violently by the funnel. It’s a large chunk of metal debris—a piece of a vehicle or a building, and it’s sailing toward us with dangerous speed.
“Look out!” Fisher yells. Roger leans over me, shielding me with his upper body.
“No!” I scream. A large chunk of metal flying at Roger’s body from a tornado might kill him. Tears squeeze from my eyes, and I hold Roger tight, smelling steam train and aftershave and feeling him breathe.
I wait for something awful.
But it doesn’t come. No painful impact or crashing blow. And Roger and I are still breathing the same air, huddled together, afraid to move because of the crash that hasn’t come. Why hasn’t it come?
And I realize that the wind’s roar is quieting down. It weakens. It retreats, like it’s no longer interested in destruction, or in me. Debris falls around us and comes to rest as the building creaks and settles. Roger exhales in relief, his breath warm. Fisher, Thomas, and Mr. Bixly stir against the fence nearby. Elephant feet shuffle and trunks drag in the dirt behind us. Nyah’s trunk lifts from my shoulders, bobbing between me and Roger, touching our heads and leaving a little slime behind.
Roger breathes deep, holding me in his arms. He slowly moves away and sits up. Miss Amanda is still standing directly in front of us, holding Angus Fenn’s box in her outstretched arms. A thin sliver of light frames the box where Miss Amanda is not quite touching it.
“The wind let go of it, and I caught it for you,” she says.
I’m too surprised to answer. Surprised that a ghost could catch a metal box hurled through the air by a tornado, but then, I suppose I’ve noticed that Miss Amanda has been able to move the things she touched when she was alive. And who knows the strength of a ghost? Apparently, they can be quite strong.
Maybe it helps when the ghost is trying to set things right.
“Amanda,” Roger says, holding his head and wincing, “we owe you our lives.”
“Yeah,” Fisher breathes in relief. He stares at the box in Miss Amanda’s hands. “Thanks for catching that.”
“A-Amanda?” Thomas wipes his eyes with the back of his hand, and it smears mud across his face. “Is that you? How?”
And I realize Thomas knows her. And it makes so much sense that he would. After Angus Fenn brought Nyah and Tendai to the Lexington Zoo, Amanda would have spent a lot of time at the elephant barn. She did say she liked the elephants.
“Have you never seen me visiting Nyah, Thomas?” Miss Amanda asks. “I’ve been here a lot lately. But you have to pay close attention to notice the presence of a misplaced spirit.”
Thomas’s mouth is hanging open, and he nudges Mr. Bixly, who just nods.
“It’s all right, Thomas,” Mr. Bixly says. “You pay such close attention to those elephants, no one would expect you’d be able to divide your attention with a ghost.”
“Frank Bixly!” Miss Amanda scolds. “I’m a misplaced—”
“You’re a misplaced spirit, I know,” Mr. Bixly says, as though he’s heard this from Miss Amanda as many times as I have. His white button-up shirt is stained with mud and soaked with rain. What little hair he has on his head has blown loose from his usual carefully combed style. And I realize Mr. Bixly chose to get Fisher and Roger and me to safety instead of saving Angus Fenn’s box for himself. And that thing he said to Thomas about paying attention to the elephants. That was actually kind of…nice.
Miss Amanda sets Angus Fenn’s box in front of me. Her face looks much younger. Like in her photos. “Well, now…it seems I had to do the right thing to get my faded memories back, and now I can see it all clear as a mountain spring. I didn’t recognize you that night I saw you alone with Nyah, but maybe misplaced spirits get a boost of intuition. I knew Roger would take good care of you. But with my memories back, I recognize you now. You know, darlin’, you were just a little thing when I last saw you at the circus, but now you’re the spitting image of your mama Eden sitting there with Nyah. And you’ve got your daddy’s touch with the animals. His name was Russell Palmer. He was one of the keepers.”
Roger startles beside me, and Fisher gasps in surprise. I’m grateful to Miss Amanda for saying what she did. My heart fills up fuller than it’s ever been—happy to know, not just to wonder, that I look like my mom and that I got some of my connection with animals from my dad. I stroke Nyah’s trunk with my hand. I’m holding the trunk of an elephant who knew my family.
“You must’ve understood the clue I left under the floorboard,” she says. “You found the train ticket, right?”
“I, uh…” The train ticket was a clue from Miss Amanda? “I noticed the date. You put the ticket under the gift shop floor?”
“Well, don’t look so surprised. You figured out the treasure was hidden in that train car, didn’t you? I rolled up that ticket and shoved it under the floor as soon as I realized I might not remember the gift shop was a train car. I was running out of time, and Roger never noticed me when I tried to get his attention. Once he had you to care for, you were his world.”
I feel Roger’s warmth next to me, and my heart fills up even more.
Nyah’s trunk bobs over my head and shoulders and then stretches long toward Miss Amanda. Miss Amanda moves closer to the fence. The tiny gap between Miss Amanda’s hand and Nyah’s trunk doesn’t seem to matter to either of them, and Nyah wraps the end of her trunk around that space like she’s holding Miss Amanda just a little.
“Thank you for bringing me Angus Fenn’s box,” I say.
Miss Amanda smiles, and her blue eyes shine in a way that looks both happy and sad. “It’s the least I could do for his granddaughter.”
Her words aren’t a surprise to me, but it’s strange to hear them out loud. They are the very tip of a mountain of things I’ve begun to realize. But they are a surprise to everyone else. I can feel Fisher and Roger staring at me. I look around at Thomas and Mr. Bixly. Thomas smiles behind all the mud.
“Angus Fenn, huh?” He looks delighted. Maybe even relieved. “Well, that explains a lot.”
Mr. Bixly’s expression is one I’ve never seen on his face before. He looks almost…lost. What do General Managers do when they learn they can’t manage everything? I think, maybe, I’ve been a little wrong about Frank Bixly. The way he runs the zoo—the rules and the meetings and telling everyone what to do—he’s always trying to make things right and comply with AZA guidelines. And that means we really want the same things. We want what’s best for the animals.
Miss Amanda steps slowly away from Nyah, as if they’ve said goodbye, and she extends one hand toward me like before. She wants to give me something. I hold out my hand, and she drops her key necklace into my open palm.
“The key,” I whisper.
“It’s yours,” she says with a smile. “Your mama understood elephants, too.”
I heft the box into my lap and squeeze its key. The pictures I remember from Miss Amanda’s photo albums and the images from Nyah match up in my head like color filling black-and-white drawings. It’s a beautiful story—a sad story. But I think it ends happier than I expected. It’s the story that’s mine, and it makes me whole.
I’m Angus Fenn’s granddaughter. Eden was his daughter and my mother. And this box has been returned to its rightful owner.
“It’s not what they call you,” Miss Amanda says to me. “It’s what you answer to. You keep that in mind, you hear?”
“I will.” I wipe my eyes as tears fill them up. “Do you think you can get to where you’re supposed to be now?”
Miss Amanda smiles and nods. “It seems we’ve both found our way, darlin’.”
She turns and walks away from us, no longer “misplaced.” Like a mist evaporating in the sun, one minute she’s there, and the next—somewhere between the blink of my eyes—Amanda Holtz is gone.
&nbs
p; Time knows how to slow down when you need a few extra moments to take everything in. Roger tries to insist I open the box right away, but I’m too worried about the blood that has trickled down the side of his face and the swollen lump on his head from the barn door. He seems dazed and in a lot of pain.
Mr. Bixly says nothing about Miss Amanda, my identity, or the box. Instead, he hands Roger a handkerchief and encourages him and me to put pressure on Roger’s wound. Then he puffs out his chest and announces he will call an ambulance for Roger and then check on the guests and zoo staff in the Wild Kingdom Education Center. I’m surprised by the change in Mr. Bixly as I watch him lumber out of the barn in his muddy clothes. Maybe he’s not the only one who has changed.
Thomas moves quietly through the barn, watching the elephants and checking the barrier fence. Then he says, “Do you want me to stay with you and Lex, Roger?”
“No, Thomas. I’ll be fine,” Roger says softly. He’s leaning against the fence, and Nyah keeps snaking her trunk over him and touching his head.
Thomas hesitates a moment. He looks back and forth between me and Nyah. He closes all the training gates except the one I opened.
“I’m going to inspect the Grasslands’ fences,” Thomas says on his way out. “You never know what that twister might’ve done. Holler if you need anything, Lex. I’ll be back to check on Roger in a few minutes.”
Fisher wants to go with Mr. Bixly to find his parents, but first he has something to show me. “I grabbed those photo albums when you jumped out of the cart to help Roger,” he says.
“You did? Fisher! You’re the best!” I yell, a little too loud because Roger groans and holds his head.
Fisher’s face falls, and he hands me one album. “I sat on them to keep them from blowing away, but the wind got one from me. I hope the pictures you want most are here.”
I stand up and take it. “Thank you.” I really do want to hug him, but instead, I say, “You were right, you know.”
“Of course I was.” He smiles his million-dollar-baseball-contract smile. “What about?”
“Concentrated orange juice…wind immersion…that I needed to learn to get out of the zoo sometimes.”
Fisher nods and folds his arms all satisfied with himself. “Good thing we’re friends, then.”
“Why? Because you’re right all the time?”
“No. Because it’s always good to have a friend who can find a treasure and tell off a twister, and because I can show you around outside the zoo.” He glances at Roger, who gives us both an approving nod and smiles weakly.
“And you can show me the world of baseball,” I say.
Fisher grins, and I think he knows I mean it.
“I’ll go find my parents, so they know I’m okay,” he says. “And maybe they can come take a look at Roger’s head, in case the ambulance is slow to get here.”
“Thanks, Fisher.” I hold up the photo album.
“My pleasure, Lex from the Fenn Circus.” Fisher takes off toward the side doors and leaves the barn.
I kneel beside Roger, who reaches for my hand. “Let’s look at those pictures while we wait,” he says softly. “Or you could open that box.”
I swallow and look at Roger’s strong engineer arms and his gentle eyes. I’m not sure I want to know what’s in the box right now. It’s enough to know something of who I am, and who I was before I came to the zoo. But now that there’s a possibility of finding some family somewhere, I know I don’t want to leave Roger and the Old County Bank. I don’t want to leave home. This is my home, and Roger is my family. I had this home and family all along, but somehow I missed it.
Nyah snorts and bobs her trunk over the ground behind the fence. She finds some stray fruit that was tossed around when the supply closet doors went flying off their hinges. She lifts the fruit to her mouth, her bottom lip flopping open as she chews.
“Roger?” I say.
“Yes.”
“I snooped around in your room when I thought you might be hiding Angus Fenn’s box from Mr. Bixly.”
“Hmm. I saw that my chair was moved and my closet had been opened. I wondered what you’d been up to.”
“Yes, well, I found a box of old things in your closet, and a bunch of papers with our names on them under your bed.”
Roger nods again. Maybe I should help him lie down.
“Sorry,” I say. “Don’t talk if it hurts your head. I shouldn’t bother you about this right now.”
“I’m all right, Lex,” Roger says. “I want to tell you this.” He shifts his position on the floor and looks straight into my eyes. “Fern and Gordon suggested I should’ve told you this a long time ago. I’m not very good at this sort of thing.”
“Okay.” My heart pounds a little harder, and I think of the picture of the two of us in the engine cab and how he framed it and set it on my nightstand. I think of the map of the world on my wall and how there are no stickers on it for me or for Roger.
“I’ve never talked to you about my family. And I think it would have been better for you, growing up here with me, if I had. Maybe you would have felt better about your own place in the world.
“I never knew my mom. But my dad—he was a great dad. I’ll tell you more about him sometime soon. Those were his things you found in my closet.”
I nod, feeling his words enter my heart and stay there.
“My dad got sick, and a few years before I found you, the sickness made him completely forget me. He didn’t know my face when I went to visit him.” Roger looks like he’s hurting again, but it isn’t the bump on his head this time. “I guess, after he died, it was just too hard for me to talk about dying. With anyone. So I didn’t tell you about him, and I didn’t tell you about Amanda, and I didn’t talk to you the way you needed me to—about your parents being missing from your life.”
“And that’s why you never wanted to talk about it when I asked about my family…and dying.”
He nods. “I’m sorry, Lexington. I could’ve done a better job of talking to you about your parents and helping you with grief. I don’t know what happened to them. We tried everything to find them, but they weren’t reported missing from anywhere. It makes a lot more sense now.” He taps his fingers on the box. “If they were with the circus, they never settled down in one place. And if they closed the circus down and sold everything off, which I believe they did, no one from the circus would’ve reported them missing either.
“I’ve tried to be a good…” He pauses and swallows. The vein in his forehead that sometimes swells up when he’s working or thinking hard is pulsing now. He takes my hand in his and squeezes it gently. His eyes are glistening, but he smiles as a single tear spills out. “I asked you this a long time ago, but the way I said it, or because I couldn’t talk about death to you, it made the timing all wrong. I guess I’ve been afraid to bring it up again.”
Roger was afraid? I can’t imagine that. But now I think all this has something to do with that psychology book he’s been reading.
“Ask me what?”
“Well, now that you have some new information about yourself and who your family is”—he tilts his head toward the box and the photo album—“this may be the wrong thing to say.”
“It’s okay,” I say, thinking of what Mr. Bixly couldn’t say and how it bothered me, and how I’ve been aching to have this conversation more than I knew. “Tell me.”
“Those papers you found under my bed—they’re the legal papers from when you first came to the zoo. It’s everything that was required for me to take care of you. But some of them are about…adopting you. If you want. I mean, unless you find that you have a family to go to”—he nods at the box again—“I’d be very happy if I could adopt you and be your dad…if you want.”
I hug Roger right there on the floor of the elephant barn. I feel his heartbeat and breathe
in his aftershave, and he holds me. And we stay there, just like that, until the paramedics arrive with their equipment and bandages, and I only let go of him so they can lift him onto the stretcher and take him to the hospital. And I sit next to him in the ambulance, holding his hand all the way there.
An unexpected phenomenon followed that second tornado over the Lexington Zoo. Cleanup crews and zoo staff found interesting old photographs littered throughout the exhibits, the trees, the rooftops, and the flower beds. The twister scattered the black-and-white photos and color photos of circus people and animals from the album it snatched away from Fisher. We haven’t found them all, but anytime someone brings me a few more pictures, I add them to the growing display on the wall of my room.
Roger’s head injury kept him in the hospital for two days, but he’s home now on doctor’s orders to rest and sleep a lot. The train isn’t running while he heals, but the zoo isn’t open to the public yet anyway. Repairs to the elephant barn, the Leighs’ house, and some of the nearby maintenance buildings will take a while, and those areas have been blocked off. The zoo will open again next week. In the meantime, the Leighs are sleeping in the living room of the Old County Bank and keeping Roger from doing too much.
Mrs. Leigh’s kitchen is under repair, so she cooks in ours. She’s already stocked the Old County Bank with things Roger never buys, like fish sauce and four different kinds of curry paste, and she’s teaching me to make khao pad moo, which is pork fried rice. She also brought her two wooden elephants and set them by our door. I asked her to do that. The Leighs’ living room, where the elephants sat, was undamaged in the storm. So I think those elephants really are good luck.
All of us living under the same roof means Mrs. Leigh gets more opportunities to remind me I have a paper to write. But I don’t mind. After the week I had with the twister, and Nyah, and finding out who I am, I have a lot to write about.
My grandfather’s box was not full of money, as I thought it would be. It was full of things Roger says are worth money. Apparently, certificates for something called stocks dating back to 1959, for some company called General Telephone and Electrics, means that Angus Fenn’s family, which is me, owns part of a major cell phone company. I guess I don’t have to use a radio to call Roger anymore…but we have to talk about that, he says. Apparently, my grandfather didn’t entirely trust his stocks, though, because he also had some gold in his locked box. That’s why it was so heavy.
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